Sandwiched between its Wednesday launch of a streaming subscription music service that takes on Spotify and Pandora, and the early Thursday announcement that it will try to advance physics in a big way by investing in quantum-computing research, the Mountain View-based giant quietly slipped in word that it was creating a new gaming service.

It was as unsexy as a public announcement can get. Most folks can’t tell their SDKs from LBJ. But for the conglomeration of nerds attending Google’s I/O developer’s conference in San Francisco, it might well become the Holy Grail – a toolkit that leverages Google’s social and cloud-storage tools across multiple platforms.

On the face of it, Google Play game services isn’t all that different from the iOS Game Center or smaller, more-social gaming platforms like Plus+, or even, for that matter Facebook and the social-gaming companies that use it, like Zynga.

For games developed using the new Google tools, it means gamers can share high scores and leaderboards and seek out opponents for multiplayer gaming. In a post on the Google Developers Blog, lead product manager Greg Hartrell wrote, “a game can have up to 4 simultaneous friends or auto-matched players in a game session together with support for additional players coming soon.”

Developers can also incorporate achievements in their games, increasing engagement and promoting different kinds of play.

But if you step back, there’s a lot more going on than just a few extra features being rolled out for developers of Android and iOS games. Google Play game service could be a game-changer. How? To put it simply for end-users, if developers get the games right and Google keeps providing its massive cloud infrastructure, they’ll pretty much make your device disappear and let you focus on pure gaming experience, wherever you are, whenever you have an Internet connection and access to your Google account.

You’ll start a game on your Android device while riding the bus. You can pause and save progress to the Google Cloud, pick up the game later, exactly where you were, on your iPhone 5, then complete it on your home PC or Mac.

Phil Larsen, chief marketing officer for Halfbrick, the Australian app developer that created the Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride games, views the service as possibly being “the Great Consolidator.”

“With Android, it’s so fragmented, anyone could create an SDK for cloud or social features. Because Google didn’t have one, it only added to the fragmentation,” he told Game Theory by phone. “This is a really strong step for Google. It’s really done well to establish Google as a games platform, with Android devices as a platform for that.”

Larsen said so many people have Android devices and Google accounts that he wouldn’t be surprised to see the new game service draw away installed base from the iOS game center and put pressure or push out smaller, more-niche, mobile social-gaming platforms.

“The interesting thing is that the Apple Game Center goes for iOS games, whereas Google will go both ways,” he said. “There’s a tendency to stick with the service that is supported with their platform. Well, a lot of people have Gmail accounts and Google accounts. It will be interesting to see where the pickup is. Will people say, ‘I don’t want to use Game Center anymore?”

To be sure, the Apple Game Center model is very different. It’s tightly integrated into the iOS and Mac OSX environments, is extremely strong, with over 150 million user accounts and is profitable for Apple and developers, likely ensuring continued support.

But it’s hard to look at the numbers and not see how Wednesday’s game service announcement could be the start of making Google into the same sort of serious rival it has become in so many areas, including streaming music, books, movies, apps, operating systems, cloud storage, navigation, shopping, advertising and other areas where it focuses its resources and infrastructure.

Comscore reported May 3 that Android had a 52% share of the smartphone market, or 71.1 million subscribers. And the new game developer toolkit also comes in an iOS flavor. Apple’s share of the smartphone market in the U.S. was 39%, or 53.3 million subscribers. Many of those phones and their users are fair game for the new Google Play game service.

For those focused on playing games with others, wherever they are, on whatever device they’re on, sharing results and saving them to the Google Cloud, the new service would be a major, unifying upgrade to the hodgepodge of options available now. A day after the service was announced, though, it’s clearly a work in progress.

Game Theory tried to test some of the currently limited Google Play game service functionality on one of the early adopter games, Beach Buggy Blitz, from Vector Unit, with mixed results.

After updating the version on my Samsung Galaxy Note II from the U.S. Google Play store (my Hong Kong version wasn’t updating properly), I immediately noticed the addition of a big blue-bordered red button with a white G+ on the lefthand side of my game screen. Touch it and you are asked to sign into the game using your Google account. You are warned that the app will collect the names, information and lists of people you’re connected to on Google+. You do have the option of editing that list. Ditto for deciding who gets to see your game activity, making it public or private. After that, sign-in is supposed to be completed.

Unfortunately, my app crashed several times, forcing me to reboot the device. Within three minutes, the game worked fine. I was racing my dune buggy against the clock, dodging obstacles and collecting coins. But the G+ button had disappeared, making me wonder if my login had taken and if I was playing socially or not.

It wasn’t obvious to me, so, under settings, I went back to the old “community” button that still remains on the app and clicked on Google+, to find that I was, indeed, logged in to my Google account. I don’t know if the mysteriously disappearing G+ button is a bug, but it’s certainly confusing during my first experience of the new game-service feature. And if I am logged in and want to change something, where do I find the Google+ settings for the game on my smartphone?

The developer also left on the Facebook and Twitter buttons, offering a manual way to share your game information on those social-networking platforms.

On my iPhone 4S, the game hasn’t been updated yet to incorporate the new Google Play game service, leaving me with only the choice of logging on to the Apple Game Center.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.